The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  She said, “You know the last thing Bruce said to me? He lived for a couple of weeks. I got to see him. The last thing he said was, ‘Reggie, do you believe how ridiculous this is?’ He always called me Reggie.”

  Dallworth was at a loss. It occurred to him that if they remained here, in this small brick house with its patter of rain on the roof, she would just grow more sad. He could not ask her to marry him while she wept over being thirty-six and a widow—while she continued to think of her first love.

  The rain ran down the window. His inheritance check wasn’t due for another week. Mack wasn’t letting him have any income from the glassware business. It might have been so wonderful to say, “Let’s go down to Florida and play a few holes at Sawgrass.” He supposed he could arrange it. But now, in the moment, the idea seemed too extreme, and even, in some obscure way, aggressive. He said, “Let’s go out and play the fourth hole.”

  “It’s raining.”

  “So? There’s no lightning or anything.”

  “I’ve never even held a golf club.” She seemed amused by the idea.

  “I’ll show you.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’ve got my clubs in the trunk of my car.”

  She got up and walked naked to the window and looked out. The rain streamed on the glass and made a reflection of itself trailing down her skin. She looked lovely, he thought, though somehow wounded, flawed; too vulnerable. He averted his eyes, with some effort of seeming casually to glance at the clock on the wall. “Well?” he said.

  She gazed at the intricately folded grayness hanging over the wet trees, the dragging ends of clouds sailing away in the breezes.

  She said, “All right.”

  The warm rain soaked them before they got very far down the fairway to the tee. The leaves of the maples and oaks flanking the lawns of the newer houses drooped: they looked black. A thick mist obscured the descending slope off the tee, and to the left, the sixth green seemed half-absorbed into the whiteness of mist and ground fog. They heard traffic in the near distance, and the far-off hum of a groundskeeper’s tractor. But nothing moved nearby. He carried his clubs on his shoulder, and she held onto his other arm, keeping close. He felt rather amazingly good. Her dress, a blue cotton one with short sleeves, hung on her, as did her hair, which was two shades darker. She looked like a little girl.

  He set his bag against the wooden bench, got two Maxflis out, pocketed them, selected the driver, gripped it, waggled it slightly. She stood a few paces away, arms folded, watching. Back in high school, when Mack had been best at all the sports, Dallworth used to watch his older brother strut and achieve for his beautiful girlfriend, who was not a cheerleader but could have been, and who was always right there, watching him. Dallworth had never been granted the experience. He propped the club against his leg, and brought out his glove and a couple of tees.

  “You need a glove?”

  “Especially today,” he said, peering off into the rain and mist, aware of her gaze on him. As he stepped up to the hitting area, it occurred to him that in all the thousands of attempts he had made to hit the ball right, he had succeeded so little and so few times. Abruptly, and with something like the feeling of terrible discovery, he had a moment of knowing how slim his chances were of striking the ball right under any circumstances, much less these. He hesitated, remembering, as a little spasm worked in the nerves at the base of his neck, all the lies he had told her in the last few weeks. He had for some reason not felt them as lies until this second. The rain poured over his head and shoulders, and he looked at the water-soaked ground and was afraid. He took a practice swing. He felt rusty, though he had played thirty-six holes yesterday. Perhaps he should let her try to hit it first?

  Steeling himself for what he was now almost certain would be a humiliation, he gripped the ball with the tee, and set it down into the soft earth.

  “I’m excited,” she said. The rain had drenched her. Mascara streaked her face. She looked like a crying clown.

  “Here goes,” he said.

  She nodded. Water poured past her chin.

  He stepped up to the ball, planted his feet, then stepped back to take another practice swing. The club felt wrong; the grip was wet now. Everything ran with the rain, water beading up on the clean aluminum shaft. He stepped back to the ball, held his head still, eyed the ball, its whiteness in that rainy light, thinking to keep the left arm straight. He pulled back slowly, trying to remember everything. And he felt as he reached the top of his backswing that he was going to smash it, he was going to knock it disappearing into the mist, the longest and best hit of his life—because this was Romance, and how it ought to be, and God would give it to him. He felt it in his bones; it was meant to be, something they would talk about many years from now, the perfect smack of the ball, its flight into the obscure distance.

  He brought the club down with huge force and caught the wet ground about a foot behind the ball.

  The club head dug into the mud, and the shock of it went up his arms. It took some effort to pull it out, and as he did so it made an embarrassing sucking sound, but he kept his balance and tried to seem casual, waggling the club head, with its clod of dirt clinging to it. The dirt looked like a wet rag. He tapped the club head against the ground, twice, and the clod dropped off. There was now a deep gash in the turf behind the ball. Bending down, water pouring from him, he moved the ball a few inches farther along. She was a dark blue shape in the corner of his eye, standing very still.

  For her part, she had understood that things were going wrong, and had attributed this to the weather. His swing looked nothing like the few she had seen on television; there was something too deeply swaying about it, as if he were trying something balletic. She wanted to encourage him, but kept silent for fear of distracting him, knowing that people kept still while a golfer was getting set to hit the ball.

  She was a little surprised when he turned to her.

  “You okay?” he said.

  This touched her. That he could be worried about her at such a time, contending with the rain. Someone so serious about what he was trying to do. “Sure.” She smiled.

  He thought she was trying not to laugh. “Sorry this is taking so long,” he said. “I’m not usually this slow.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He addressed the ball, attempted once more to keep all the instructions in his head, left arm stiff, weight evenly balanced, head still, concentrating. He brought the club back, told himself to swing easy, and shifted too much, nearly lost balance, bringing the club around with far more speed than he intended, and missed everything. The bright wet aluminum shaft made a water-throwing swish. He stepped back. “Another practice swing.”

  “You really look violent,” she said.

  “It’s a violent thing,” he told her. “The swing.”

  “I can see that.”

  This had been the wrong thing to do. He tried forgetting that she was there, and swung, and hit wide of the ball this time, taking another very large, muddy divot that traveled a good forty yards.

  She watched it arc out of sight into the mist, and understood that this, too, was not a good thing. She could hear the distress in his breathing. “Wow,” she said, because she could think of nothing else to say.

  He waggled the club, put it up to the ball, and accidentally bumped it off the tee. It rolled an inch or so. “Damn rain,” he said, bending to set it right again.

  “It’s really coming down,” she said.

  He swung, missed once more, hitting behind it again, another clod of mud. Now he stepped closer and with no waggle at all, swung again. He made contact this time: the very tip of the club head sent the ball on a direct line at a ninety-degree angle from him, hit the tee marker slightly to the right of its curve, ricocheted, and seemed to leap in a white trailing streak toward the ball washer standing ten feet away and behind the tee.r />
  The ball bounced off that, came back like a shot, and struck him in the groin.

  He went down on all fours, then lay down, and she was at his side, hands on his arm, trying to turn him. For a few very awful moments he was aware only of his pain, and of the spreading area of pain in his middle. He held his hands around his upper abdomen, out of sheer humiliation. She was saying something, but he couldn’t hear it. He was sick to his stomach. The rain pelted his face, and then it was water pouring from her hair; she had put her face down to his.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Okay,” he managed.

  He did not look okay to her. She knew the ball had struck him, but hadn’t seen exactly where. Because he was holding his stomach, she assumed it was there. It had all happened so fast.

  “Can you get up?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “My ball—” He stopped, and tried to hide what he had almost said in a gasp for air.

  “I don’t know where it went.”

  “No,” he said. “Please.”

  “It hit you,” she said. “I didn’t see.”

  “My balls,” he said. It had come out in spite of him. He wanted to sink down into the wet grass and mud and disappear. From where he lay, he could see the divots and dug-up places where he had tried to be someone other than who he was.

  “Can you get up?” she said.

  He found that he could. He had imagined that they would play the fourth hole, and he would help her. The whole thing seemed like an idiotic kid’s dream now. All of it, including ever getting any good at this game.

  She was helping him walk. “My clubs,” he said. “Damn. Everything’s getting wet.”

  “Here,” she told him, moving him slightly. She got him to sit on the bench. He saw his golf club lying where he had dropped it, and the ball, a few feet away, in a perfect lie, the surrounding drenched greenness.

  She had placed herself on the bench next to him, and held his hands in her own. “It doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Really.” It was clear to her now where he had been hit. She put her arms around him. They might have been huddled there against some great grief. The rain kept coming.

  He couldn’t speak quite yet.

  “Someday when it’s dry,” she told him.

  At the house, she helped him out of his clothes, then got him to lie down in the bed with the blanket up to his shoulder; he lay on his side. His hair soaked the pillowcase, and he began to shiver. The nausea had subsided somewhat. He remembered his clubs and tried to tell her about them, but she had anticipated him. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

  When she had been gone a few seconds, he got himself out of the bed and limped to the window to look out at her, beyond the little row of fir trees, making her way along the wet fairway in the rain, hurrying, her arms folded tight about herself. He had never felt so naked. She disappeared into the misty, raining distance while he watched. Then, moaning low, feeling sick again, he went into the bathroom and looked at himself, all gooseflesh. He pulled a towel off the rack and began drying his hair. There wasn’t anything to put on, nothing to do to get out, get away. In her closet he found a man’s clothes—the second Bruce’s clothes. They were all way too big for him. The sleeves hung down, the shoulders sagged. He put them back, and went along her hallway to the drier, his clothes tumbling there. He opened the door and looked in; they were all still very wet. Closing the door with a barely suppressed moan, he pressed the button to start it again. It would be an hour at least. He struggled—it was still very hard to walk—back to the window. She was nowhere. Here was her small patio, with its wrought-iron furniture. A round table, four chairs, a closed umbrella. He saw citronella candles, an overturned glass, a small statuette of a bird in flight. The gas grill had a black cover over it, like a cowl. The water ran down the sides. It all looked alien, so much not his, not home. He got himself back under the blankets and waited. His eyes burned; he discovered that he was deeply drowsy, and wondered if he might pass out.

  She had started down the fairway, uncomfortable and even irritable in the rain, wondering what would happen now. She felt oddly that some serious change would come, and she recalled how her grief over the first Bruce had included an element of anger at him for getting killed in that bungling way. She had always felt guilty for that unacceptable emotion, and perhaps she had put up with the second Bruce’s casual mistreatment of her as a kind of atonement. Nearing the fourth tee, she had an image of Dallworth flailing at the ball on its little yellow tee; it made her begin to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. She went to the bench and sat down, sopping wet, her dress flapping on her thighs with every movement, and she put her hands to her face and laughed helplessly, almost hysterically, for what seemed a long while. It would be hard to explain what took so much time. But she felt confident of his kindness, his wish to please her, and anyway she couldn’t move. The muscles of her rib cage seized up, and she went on laughing.

  Finally she picked up the club, the ball, and dropped each, one by one into the bag. Then she began trying to haul it back to her house. For a slow, pouring, almost painful fifteen minutes she was just moving in the heavy mist and rain, surrounded by the soft, sodden, close-clipped grass; the base of the bag created a dark mud streak, like a plow blade, behind her. She didn’t care. Her back ached; her arms felt as though they might pull out of the sockets.

  She found him curled up in her bed. She set the bag of clubs under the eave of the patio and stepped inside, dripping. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she said. “Want to join me?” He was asleep. She stepped to the edge of the bed, gazed at him, then reached down and shook his shoulder, a little more roughly than she meant to. “Hey.”

  He rose up out of a dream of being jostled in a crowded place and was startled to find her looming over him, water beaded on her face, running down her jaw, her hair matted to her cheeks. He noticed that her ears stood straight out from her head, and oddly this made him ache under the heart. He almost reached up and touched her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was all a lot of lying.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not any good at it,” he told her. “I’m awful. And I’m not getting any better.”

  “You’re okay,” she told him.

  She went in and took a brief shower, toweled off, and put a bathrobe on. She found him still in the bed.

  “Those other clothes are all too big for me,” he said, and began to cry.

  This startled them both. She got into the bed with him and held him, like a little boy. When he had gained control over himself, he said, “I don’t know.”

  She resisted the urge to be sharp with him. She said, “John, are you physically damaged?”

  He turned to look over his blanketed shoulder at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Do you need a doctor?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Do you know what aspect of golf I’ve never understood and would like to understand?”

  He waited.

  “Putting.”

  “I’m even worse at that,” he told her, with a disconsolate sigh.

  “I’ve heard people say it’s the hardest thing.” ““I thought Bruce never played.”

  “Let’s not talk about him. Or anybody named Bruce,” she said.

  A moment later, he said, “It is hard to do, putting.”

  “And I bet you could show me a lot.”

  He understood perfectly well what she was doing now, and he knew that he would never question it or examine it very closely. She lay breathing into the base of his neck, here, under the blanket, her arm resting on his abdomen, the elbow causing the slightest discomfort, but she was this friendly presence, trying to give him something. He said, “Can I stay here tonight?”

  “You know you can.”

  He shifted a little, and she moved her arm so that her hand rested on his hip. “If it stops raining, maybe in the morning we can spend some time on the practice green,”
he said.

  She murmured, “That would be fun.”

  They went to sleep at almost the same time, and dreamed separately, of course. She saw herself leading children through a sunny field of flowers, and too many of them were misbehaving, breaking the stems off; he dreamed that he was dreaming, in her bed, while she emptied the closet of clothes that were, as things often are in dreams, outlandish, out of all scale, and too big for any normal man.

  SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME

  Here are Marlee and Ted, married one year tonight, walking into the Inn at New Baltimore, an exclusive establishment on the main street of this little village in the Virginia hunt country. Ted’s ex-wife, Tillie, recommended the place, calling it the perfect surrounding for spending a romantic evening. A wonderful setting in which to celebrate an anniversary. The fact that it was Tillie who did the recommending is something Marlee didn’t know about until five minutes ago.

  They get out of the car and walk across the parking lot in the cool early spring sunlight. Ted’s hand rests just below her elbow, guiding her, and she moves a little to step away from him. In the foyer of the restaurant, they are greeted by a tall, long-faced man. He offers two menus and leads them into a dim corridor whose walls are lined with the heads of stuffed animals and heavy gilt-framed paintings. The paintings remind Marlee of the ones in the student union at the University of Illinois, where she was a part-time student when she met Ted, only eighteen months ago. It seems worth mentioning to him—it’s something to say, anyhow.

  “These remind me of the union,” she says.

  Her husband gives her a puzzled look. He’s sixteen years older than she is, and this is an expression she has become fairly accustomed to.

  “The paintings,” she tells him. “The student union at Illinois has paintings like this. It’s like they were all done by the same artist. I wonder who these people are.”